Also, 'Planes, Trains' At Davison, 'Angkor' At Mansfield

What does your browser history say about you? Enough to compose a self-portrait?

The thought is appalling, or maybe hilarious. Artist Evan Roth liked the idea. Roth called up four months of his Internet cache and made printouts of every page, then combined the printouts into one long scroll of paper filled with screen shots.

It made him a little nervous.

"It's uncensored. When I sent the pages to the printer I tried not to look at them too much," Roth said in a Skype interview from Paris, where he is working. "Even at the gallery I don't want to look at it. There's something embarrassing about it."

"Internet Cache Self-Portrait" is the centepiece of the new exhibit, "Evan Roth / Intellectual Property Donor," on view now at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

"Self-Portrait" hangs in the center of the gallery, and cascades down, spreading in both directions. It tells the story of a man with a wide variety of pop-culture interests: Kim Jong Il, Justin Bieber, "Star Trek," gargoyles, Occupy Wall Street, basketball shoes, "Toy Story," Andy Warhol, a roast beef sandwich, Tegan & Sara, Donald Trump, the Mona Lisa, the Paris Metro, his own artwork.

"It's really a hard question to ask people, a very personal invitation, 'can I have a hunk of your Internet cache?' " he said. "It's like having a video from a security camera in your home."

But the idea fascinated him, the place people have in their computers, and in their cellphones.

Another piece in the show tells of Roth's obsession with "Angry Birds." "Level Cleared" consists of 1,540 little cellphone screen covers, each marked with the date it was used to play the popular app, and when he cleared a level.

"We're dealing with a new kind of computing, casual computing, in our pockets all the time. I think people are harboring some guilt about the amount of time we're spending on it," he said. "I think we view a lot of these casual computing apps as something to do while standing in line at the grocery store or commuting on the subway, to kill a few minutes. But that's not all the things we could be doing with that time."

Pamela Tatge, director of the Center for the Arts, called that installation "a study in obsession ... a contrast of the excitement that happens in gaming with the monotony that actually takes place in the physical world."

In addition to the Internet, Roth's exhibit takes on the world of graffiti, which he likens to cyberspace. "Graffiti is essentially a hacker community. My love affair with graffiti is not about the paint but in thinking about graffiti as another way of hacking systems that isn't digital."

'Planes, Trains And Automobiles'

At the nearby Davison Art Center on Wesleyan's campus is "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," an exhibit of historical photography from the 1860s to the present day, focusing on means of transportation.

The exhibit takes viewers from a 1864 view of the Altoona Pass, one of the focuses of Gen. Sherman's Civil War campaign, to an 1899 colored "photochrom" of Colorado's Marshall Pass, to 1912 shots by precocious teenage photog Jacques-Henri Lartigue, to the days when vehicles became more commonplace, first shiny new, then old and broken-down.

"During the Great Depression, it was often the last possession left to a family, a decrepit old car taking them to California or Oregon," said curator Claire Rogan. "They became emblematic of the last hope of self-sufficiency."

'Silent Faces'

At the Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies on Wesleyan's campus, "Mary Heebner: Silent Faces/Angkor" is an exhibit of drawings, paintings, photography and writing to conjure up the spirit of the Cambodian religious site Angkor Wat. The temple's bas-reliefs of apsaras — female cloud and water spirits from Hindu and Buddhist mythology — are the inspiration for her metallic pigment and graphite grid collages, created on handmade paper.

"EVAN ROTH / INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DONOR" will be at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University in Middletown until March 2. "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" will be at the university's Davison Art Center until Thursday, March 6. "Mary Heebner: Silent Faces/Angkor" will be at the campus' Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies until May 25. Wesleyan.edu/cfa/